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Dialing Into Grand Champeen
By BEN ZOLLO
EDITOR'S NOTE: For more with Grand Champeen, check out our Archives
for a review of their latest CD, Dial T for This.
 ure rock and roll doesn't surface that often anymore. Power-chords, heart-thumping drums and melodies that are easy to grasp seem to be a thing of the past. And a band that prefers to play and sing every note on the album themselves, as opposed to outsourcing guitar solos to hired help or composing entire arrangements on an i-book, make for an even rarer treat. Austin-based Grand Champeen's latest album, Dial T for This, is rock and roll in the genre's simplest and finest form: danceable, head-bumping fun. Songs that will linger in your head for days are strung throughout their most creative and tightly-composed album to date. We spoke with Channing Lewis, the band's main songwriter about Dial T for This and the current state of rock and roll.
BLUERAILROAD: What was the recording process like for this album?
CHANNING LEWIS: The recording process was more successful this time than it's even been with our previous records, but it was definitely hard work because we were striving for something that we haven't really worked for in the past, which was a little bit sharper, a little bit tighter of a record. In the past we had definitely relied on attitude [laughs] and mayhem to gloss over whatever shortcomings we had as singers, guitar players, drummers, what have you. It was definitely more of a free-for-all. And on this one we wrote some songs that had vocal harmonies that you can't fake. And rhythmically it was pretty challenging.
We knew early on that we had to step up our game. So when we went into the studio it was after probably over a year of rehearsing to kind of prepare, to execute at the level what we wanted to for this record, to make it really solid. But it really worked out. We got in there and were able to come out with an end result that is closer to what we envisioned than I really thought possible. But it was good because it was a fairly creative atmosphere. We were lucky to have our own studio so we were able to take our sweet time. That helped because we were trying to do everything ourselves. The album was sort of this backlash against the R&B and hip-hop world where every song is so-and-so featuring so-and-so and so-and-so. It's like nobody does anything themselves anymore. So we were like, 'We're going to play everything.' And thank God we had plenty of studio time because it wasn't easy. There were horns on there and we're not horn players, but we eventually figured it out.
And strings too.
Yeah, fortunately our other guitar player, Michael Crow, is actually a pretty accomplished violin player, so that wasn't quite the struggle. We're all very half-assed pianists, none of us are good but we all wish we were. But adding stuff like the piano and horn and the strings and all that kind of stuff was stuff we hadn't really done before, and the vocal harmonies, all that bodied up to something that is a little bit more rich and has more breadth than our previous efforts that were a wall of guitars and half-singing and half-screaming.
The album's title is interesting.
You know I'd like there to be a great story behind it, but I'd probably have to make one up. It's actually an album title that we came up with prior to our last record, The One that Brought You and it was one that we kicked around for our last record and almost called it Dial T for This but we, for whatever reason, decided against it. And when this record was about halfway done, we started in on the whole title search, which is always this huge burden for us. It's like harder than anything. A million things got thrown out and we kind of kept coming back there. But its origins are kind of lost on me now it's been so long since we came up with it. It's definitely a reference to the Hitchcock movie Dial M for Murder but I don't know why we got "Dial T for This." To me it sounds funny. I don't know if anyone else perceives it as a humorous title but it seemed like it to me.
How do you write your songs? Do you write lyrics before music?
It's evolved actually pretty considerably in a pretty short amount of time. In previous records each of us were writing songs but we would always bring essentially what was a complete song to the band. And you know we were always giving each other free range as to what to play, but as far as the structure and the lyrics and everything, that was pretty well set.
And for this record, we did a lot more collaborating with regards to the arrangements and the format of songs. I think what allowed us to do that, was that I especially stopped writing the lyrics ahead of time. I would come up with the melody and music and everything but kind of held off on writing any lyrics for a long time and I sort of felt that freed us up to say, 'you know what, this one is feeling a little too long, let's shorten it.' And it wasn't a matter of like, 'oh but the lyrics aren't making sense if we cut out a whole verse, there are continuity issues cause the second verse relies on the first verse to make sense.' There wasn't any of that. So we kind of just like structured the song how we liked them and then actually, after we were rehearsing the songs, I am in there in rehearsal singing complete nonsense. You know, the melodies were pretty well thought out ahead of time, but lyrically it was nothingness until very late in the game and then I kind of started attaching words to songs that were, by that time, very well established.
Generally often what happened was in the process of learning the song and singing a bunch of nonsense in practice I would kind of fall back on a couple phrases that I would end up singing every time we practiced. There'd be one or two lines that I made up maybe on the fly but kind of liked and kept, and those would become the seed for the song to grow around. And sometimes it would end up being a cohesive idea lyrically. Some songs are pretty obtuse and don't necessarily mean a whole lot but they are chalked through phrases that I really like the sound of. Maybe I shouldn't say that cause it takes the mystery away of, you know, feeling that I'm really saying something important. But I always feel that there will be a meaning to stuff even if the author doesn't really consciously intend it. There's a reason words are put together. I kind of figured out what songs mean, to me, after the fact.
I think they all have fairly biographical foundations. Some of them spread out in a little bit of fiction. But in the most part, I don't know any other way to write than from a first-person, I hate to use the phrase, but from the heart [laughs], that's just horrible. But when I'm writing I feel like I'm trying to write something from me and I don't see anywhere around that.
Songs like "Gonna be the Death of Me" are very specific. It was born out of frustration with some record labels that had shown some interest in us and had kind of cooled off and the proceedings had come to a screeching halt. I felt they had been blowing smoke up our ass the whole time and had no real intention of signing us and I felt kind of cheated. I had gotten my hopes up and nothing had come up of it. I don't know if that's applicable in every line in the song but that's definitely where it came from.
"Let it Beats," the first track of the album, is rather intriguing because of its brevity and musical complexity.
At some point I got this idea in my head that I wanted to open the record with a really short song. I don't know where that came from, but I wanted to achieve a kind of epic quality in an extremely short period of time, which was a lofty goal. But in order to get that I thought it needed multiple sections and to be this whirlwind of 'What the hell just happened?' before you settle in to the rest of the record which isn't quite as chaotic as the first song. When I first started working on it I started out with just the first quiet section and I think part of me was scared that people would hear that first section and think we were a quiet band or something. So I was like, "What if we put a ferocious guitar-chord section that is like eight seconds right up front to prove that these guys are about to rock?" And then it will settle in to this stings and piano kind of section without fear of misrepresenting that we're a rock band straight off.
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